cgeb2001's DokuWiki!

Let's say you want to view a tabular blast output file.

You could

$ less <blastfile>

But because of line wrapping, the file becomes very hard to read. It would be easier to

$ less -S <blastfile>

Now all lines are unwrapped, which makes it a lot easier to read. However, for some lines some blast output fields may not be aligned vertically with the other lines. To align them, we can use the column tool:

$ column -t $'\t' <blastfile> | less -S

Awesome! However, this is quite a long command to type, each time you want to check a blast file. For commonly invoked commands, it becomes worthwile to wrap them into a custom function. Add to your .bashrc :

# for easy viewing of tab separated files
function coltab {
    column -t -s $'\t' $1 | less -S
}

Now we can simply view tab separated files like tabular blast output as follows:

$ coltab <blastfile>